When last season began, I had a decision between Kamitsubaki City Under Construction and this show, in terms of what I wanted to do my seasonal write-ups for. In the end, I decided to go with Kamitsubaki City and leave Necronomico for exactly this moment. So in a sense you could say that it informed my decision to do a Lovecraft month this October at all.
I’ve saved it for last, in part because working ahead meant starting October reviews before Necronomico even finished airing and in part because I feel like digging into this show – that not a lot of people seem to have watched despite it being newer and that tanked itself on debuts thanks to initially airing to Westerners with cruddy AI subs – was going to be a little bigger or perhaps more meaningful than my other entries.
And, going into this, I have to manage expectations somewhat: the aggregate response to Necronomico was, at first… impressively negative. But then, the same could be said about Kamitsubaki City, which was okay at least, and Housing Complex C, which was a real gem. I find that aggregates for more recent shows tend to be more swingy and less reliable, probably because they consist of a lot more kneejerk reactions. And given that Neconomico’s image did make at least a partial recovery from its stumbling debut, I had no idea what to expect when loading up the first episode.
So we begin with down-on-her-luck small-time streamer Miko, aka Necronomico, being let go from her day job and laving to find some way to deal with the fact that she’s living on her own despite an inability to legally do work. If that wasn’t bad enough, it seems that popular streamers have been falling into comas, and one victim of the same is Miko’s friend, Mayu, whose hospital bills Miko is evidently on the hook for as well.
In the pit of despair, she gets an offer to earn a fantastic amount of money doing a little playtesting, which leads her to the demo of the VR system KADATH. There she meets some other eccentrics, including a blonde rival, Kanna, who she has something of a history with.
The demo the whole crowd is set to play is a Fall Guys ripoff (remember the five minutes when that was popular?), with an even bigger prize promised for making it to the end. The dramatic art style shift for the game is actually kind of neat, and helps to sell that it is a game environment and not “real” people.
Miko, Kanna, and the five other characters who got actual lines make it to the end of the level. There, they’re introduced to the masterminds behind this whole situation, the Great Old Ones!
They’re not introduced as such right away, and in fact seem to be more of a large room of eccentrics. But as their words get more ominous, the meanest and greenest boss of the lot is introduced: Cthulhu, wearing the face of Miko’s dear Mayu. She reveals that they are responsible for the coma cases in order to gain avatars, due to the current state of the Great Old Ones as stuck in the virtual world rather than being able to walk free on Earth. Miko’s sheer rage crashes the system, where the survivors find that those who lost the game lost their minds as well. The CEO speaks to them and reveals that if they want to save the world from the return of the Great Old Ones, the only way would be defeating said deities in the games to follow. Miko doesn’t care about the world, but she wants to do anything in her power to get back at the entities who took Mayu from her. Thus ends the first episode and thus begins the show in earnest.
As I often do, I’ll take a pause here to relate a few things. In this case, since I have dedicated this month to representations of Lovecraft in anime, I might as well talk about how the Mythos is being used here.
Setting aside the direct adaptations, Housing Complex C was still a wonderfully careful and respectful appeal to its Lovecraftian source, that took the time and effort to get everything right. Kissdum pillaged a few names, but largely created its own mythology with some thematic links; it wasn’t really anything to do with Lovecraft, but it did feel like the Cosmic Horror genre that Lovecraft is credited with founding.
Necronomico here goes more with a post-Derleth pop-culture variant of the Mythos. I didn’t cover August Derleth in my start-of-the month write-up, but we’re going to be dealing with some of his more popular additions to the Mythos in this show, so I might as well give the quick and dirty version. Derleth is the guy who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos”. Something of a protege of Lovecraft, he took up the banner of the shared universe after Lovecraft died… but his work puts a distinctly different spin on things. He’s usually portrayed as having been a devout Christian, informing his addition of a cosmic framework of Good and Evil and filing the various entities into good and evil roles that existed in opposition, as well as making appeals to other familiar motifs of earthly mythology, wedding the various cosmic creations to each other like the gods of Greek antiquity or pigeonholing them into the motif of the classical elements. While his contributions to the Mythos remain controversial at best, he’s also kind of the guy who kept the lights on long enough for other writers to discover Lovecraft and pick up the torch themselves, so perhaps he can be cut a little slack.
Thus, I’ll skip ahead to our Evil Gods of the hour. I’ve already mentioned Cthulhu, here bodysnatching the persona of Miko’s very feminine bestie. But we’ll also be dealing with Zhar and Lloigor (“twin obscenities” created by Derleth; here, a pair of weird little twins who are sort of the comic relief of the Old Ones), Hastur (who did come up on my writeup), Cthugha (A Derleth creation as a “fire elemental”, but one that’s been fairly enduring unlike many of Derleth’s other additions because it’s mostly a living, malicious star. Here, her demeanor is soft spoken but coldly cruel) and Ghatanothoa (In Lovecraft’s story Out of the Aeons, a monster, worshiped as a god, with a truly horrifying Medusa-like gaze that leaves its victims conscious for eternity despite their petrification. Here, he’s got a cockatoo head?). Their MC is Tick-Tock Man, which is the name of an avatar of Nyarlathotep who is even more of a latecomer than Derleth, having been introduced in a 90’s entry for the Call of Cthulhu RPG.
When it comes to casts of the Great Old Ones, it’s not exactly an all-star list of heavy hitters, but it does mostly focus on entities that have gained popularity and that casual fans have probably heard of, placed in roughly the positions that a very distilled, osmotic sense of the Mythos would have you believe (including, but not limited to, Cthulhu’s place as the big boss, or at least seeming first among equals). And of course, despite being entities who mostly never cross paths and certainly never had any sort of cohesion in the original sources, they’re working together as our evil team.
I’m not saying this to take a shot at Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror show. At the end of the day, one of the beautiful things about the Mythos is how polymorphic it is. While I find it especially gratifying when I find a piece of newer media that seems to understand and exist on the same wavelength as Lovecraft’s own vision, the gods he created are subject to as many alternative interpretations and fanciful rewrites as the gods and heroes of classical mythology. Whatever charm exists in visions that cut closer to the source, they’re ultimately no more or less valid than those that go a wildly different way with the same prompt. What matters is not authenticity, but whether or not you’re telling a good story and using the building blocks you’ve chosen to pick up in an intelligent way that still communicates with your audience.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that it’s clear that while Necronomico’s vision may be more a pastiche of Lovecraft than an invocation, I’m not going to count that against it.
With Miko’s entry into the games assured since she could theoretically win back Mayu (The Great Old Ones being bound to any rules they set in this setting), she (like the other survivors) is given a magic floppy disk to continue the game and enter the virtual world. We get a little backstory about how Necronomico and Mayu are “It’s complicated” sisters, apparently, having grown up in the same orphanage and bonded there as family? Later on, Cthulhu names the relationship between the two as love, but that’s a fuzzy word so Miko says sisters and I’ll leave it for someone with more interest in defining that otherwise than I have to argue about it.
We also spend a little time with Kanna and find that the magic floppies numerically track sanity, with Kanna’s ticking down from 75 to 74 as she contemplates the dark situation. (Necronomico later clocks in at 50. Fitting given her brash persona. Unlike Kanna’s, it also doesn’t go down.)
It’s clear the creators were big fans specifically of the RPG Call of Cthulhu, so while introducing Derleth was necessary I’m going to slide the mark to Chaosium instead. Honestly, Hastur’s design is kind of proof, as he incorporates the version of the Yellow Sign that’s actually copyrighted by Chaosium, so while said company is notoriously permissive with letting Mythos projects use such a symbol more or less for the asking (because I suppose it helps cement their edition of the Mythos as the one in everyone’s brain) somebody did have to ask and run clearance on it.
The gang arrives and gets the rundown on the whole premise beyond the basic “Lose and go insane, win and get prizes, dip out and die” outline: there will be five games in total for this twelve-episode show, one each run by one of the heavy hitters (Hastur, Cthugha, Ghatanothoa, and Cthulhu) and then a “final round”, and anything the players gain (or lose) in the games will be written to the magic floppies bound to their souls. And to that we say, let the games begin.
As one might intuit from said screencap, Cthulhu is actually the first out of the gate as a Game Master, preparing a school-set game of tag, at first against harmless Deep Ones before the killer Shoggoths enter the stage.
If that was too easy, it turns out that Mr. Pro Gamer is enough of a tryhard to deliberately get other people killed in order to walk away with a bigger share of the loot and the potential reality-warping abilities (which he uses to hurt people IRL, of course).
Pro Gamer offs the Manga Author with a deal cut for PvP. He gloats about it a lot too, enough that Miko is able to witness the betrayal. Guess this guy’s never heard of the Prisoners’ Dilemma in game theory. He tries to off Miko and Kanna (who has been more of a friend than a rival) right at the end, but the scientist lady throws herself in as a player to save them and keep us at seven for now.
So I know I didn’t intro most of these characters since I was busy with the Great Old Ones, but let’s go over them. We’ve got variety streamer and main character Miko/Necronomico, of course, along with her seemingly friend and partner apparent despite it all, beauty streamer Kanna. Then there’s the pro gamer and antagonist in the ranks Eita, and our lab-coat clad Big Good Kei Amamura. In terms of the obviously expendable, we’ve got the Occultist Hiroshi Takajou, Teacher Seijirou Sano, and scandal-haunted actress Tsugumi Tsukasa. Along with the already-expended manga artist, of course.
Without much space to decompress the previous events (other than confirming, with the approval of the Old Ones, that Eita is willing to murder by hand someone he put into a coma with supernatural powers) we’re thrown into Hastur’s game… an escape room! Despite an abortive attempt by Miko to brute force an exit, it’s a game where folks have to work together and coordinate to win as a group. So how’s Eita going to mess this up? Honestly, he kind of doesn’t, levels of slime achieved in economical speed aside, though that’s worth enough punching. Instead, when there’s a need for a sacrifice the occultist decides to reveal his tragic past and the actress does the deed only to get tricked into the abyss herself as a bonus. Turns out the secret instructions they were following were backwards, leading to the real answer being figured out for a last second escape.
In the post script, as Eita hits Shinji Matou levels of slime in his gloating about other people getting killed, right when you desperately want him to be punched… sweet little Kanna actually beats Miko to the punch and slugs him. So that’s a nice touch, not that it says good things about how Kanna is holding up.
Next up is Ghatanothoa’s game. It’s a quiz show
Like the escape room, it takes up only one episode. In it, at first it appears that there might not be an elimination path. But points stealing emerges in the rules, and Eita uses pure spite to send Kanna into the negatives, which is a pit full of horror. However, down there, Azathoth itself takes note of her and gives her a dangerous out, with the Old Ones noting that she has the makings of a powerful witch. She shares her tragic backstory (as one of the big themes in the quiz was “dark secrets our contestants have”) and secret shame of being a victim of domestic abuse with a massive burn scar on her back, and with the blessing she was offered makes it back out with what’s left of her sanity intact.
Of course, this is made even harder on everybody because the Great Old Ones reveal at the end that they finally worked out streaming tech and displayed this game to the whole world. The silver lining, if this world were even proximally sane, is that whatever else the others had as embarrassments, Eita confessed to murder. But the news headlines we see in the wake are all about Kanna, so presumably we’re to gloss over that.
Kanna ends up moving in with Miko since her previous solo domicile got doxxed in the wake of the quiz show, but what’s up next for the cast? Another game? No, instead we actually get a downtime episode where some of the Great Old Ones manifest in the real world for a day of… just kind of enjoying themselves as humans, with Cthugha having Kei take her on a food tour of Kyoto. Of course, it’s Cthulhu who appears to Miko and Kanna. During the resulting day out, she even shows some of Mayu’s mannerisms, even getting super shippy with Miko at the end of the night, all in all creating the impression that as much as they may talk about humans as ants, the hosts of the game might be suffering from infectious humanity. The episode also introduces another character, Hunter Joe, some kind of badass in a long black coat who works with the Vatican or something but he doesn’t really do much so just remember for later that he was mentioned.
At the end, we come to the fourth and final game, a “Tower Defense” setup by Cthugha. And, wonder of wonders, Eita has forfeited from the start! Except it’s more accurate to say he’s sold his soul to the Great Old Ones, and will now be acting as an NPC in their pocket rather than a player. This being Eita, one infinitely punchable smug smirk is all you need to let you know that this, too, is something he believes makes him the best and smartest person in the room.
After a long defense, all seems lost, until it turns out Kanna’s weapon gacha provided her with a motorcycle. She runs over Eita’s face in a flying jump to grab Miko out of the air, and lands with the Akira slide for good measure.
This is so cool that even Cthugha is too busy taking in the awesome to win the game. Thus, our remaining party of four makes it to the final contest. Unfortunately, there’s another post-game twist: the damage to Kyoto in the game was mirrored onto the real Kyoto, letting the whole world know that the Old Ones are playing against a pack of streamers for the fate of Earth for real.
The loss costs Eita an eye, courtesy of Tick Tock Man, but because we’re keeping this little zit on the face of humanity around for the endgame, he rebounds into starting up cult leader activities IRL. There’s little else to it, with Kanna and Miko getting a TV spot while Kei is contacted by Hunter Joe, all leading to the final contest: raid the lairs of the four Great Old Ones upon the slopes of Kadath (or the Mountains of Madness, conflating the Dreamlands and Antarctic settings) and reach the pinnacle. Effectively, it’s a compound game for our entire final arc.
Since there’s an overall time limit, we do the thing where we bleed off a character to challenge each game. The first is the teacher, playing a card game against Hastur. Hastur makes it an increasingly high-stakes game (aside from the whole world part. Hard to top that), but the Teacher pulls it out at the end by virtue of insanity. Hastur pulled his oft-talked about family in as stakes on his side, he made it dramatic and put his life more emphatically on the line then outguessed Hastur, and it would have been sweet if not for the reveal that his family is totally imaginary but so real to him that the literal mind-reading god couldn’t tell. This results in Hastur being sent to the Shadow Realm but, as the Teacher passes out as well, the contest being considered a draw.
Kei is the second to peel off, challenging Cthugha, but her game (which seems to mostly consist of getting Kei drunk) isn’t really a focal point. Instead, we spend more time with Kanna squaring off against Ghatanothoa, who has prepared… an iMac! I always knew that Macs were evil!
Actually, what’s loaded on to the computer is more the point: a Kanna raising sim in the retro style of old Princess Maker games.
Now there’s not really a likelihood of in-game loss, but with a Great Old One in the room acting the role of the stalker fan and Kanna having to remake her own life, her sanity is in danger. It turns out that he’s also made about a zillion routes, and that Kanna has to 100% the game with less than an hour left on the doomsday clock.
Kanna does it, becoming increasingly disturbed in the process by seeing all her forsaken dreams play out, leading to Ghatanothoa tempting her by revealing that the routes were all possible world-lines, and that she could be given any one of them as a final heaven before humanity ends.
Kanna powers through her despair and finds the true route: her own life, all the torments of which she’s forced to relive. Down to her last point of sanity, she manages to punch a Great Old One, and Ghatanothoa takes his defeat and even her final rejection with no regrets. All the same, she passes out to be counted a draw, and both Cthugha and Kei end up trapped in a burning palace, so it’s all down to Necronomico making the final climb to the final challenge against Cthulhu.
It’s the Fall Guys parody again. Or if you prefer, since it’s single player this time, a Tower Climb variant on the set of R’lyeh. Miko falls into the abyss, but rather than losing immediately, starts to climb out, in the process receiving a secret pre-recorded message for Kei, which provides a ladder thanks to a backdoor exploit. This brings her directly to Cthulhu’s lair. The boss fight is rather quick, and Miko manages to send Cthulhu down to the abyss with the help of Mayu’s spirit, being rescued from falling along with via some sort of projection from Kanna.
So, that should be the end right? Miko is even informed that she’s earned Mayu back, with Tick-Tock Man acknowledging her Necronomico name. But, Miko is finally down to 1 sanity and has a different play, challenging Tick-Tock Man for the fates of those harmed by the games. Tick-Tock counters by demanding Miko’s stake be the souls of all humanity, and Miko is now insane enough to do it. Thus we get our real final game and final episode with Miko squaring off against Nyarlathotep for all the marbles. And I do mean Nyarlathotep, as the final game is more of a final battle pitting Miko – in the real world – against if not the true form of the Crawling Chaos at least one of its more physically imposing masks.
So, scrawny high-school-aged tomboy versus Eldritch Kaiju? But a constant conceit in this show is that the Great Old Ones can’t present unbeatable games, and sure enough Azathoth has released Cthulhu from the void to battle on Miko’s behalf, with Miko given a magic SNES controller to direct the fighting game… at least until she wishes for a retro arcade stick instead.
Miko button mashes her fingers bloody and becomes unable to move, though, requiring another astral projection save from Kanna to get back in the fight. She even sticks around in glowing form, taking up a player two controller to lay the smackdown on Nyarlothep while Miko mashes.
When that’s not enough, the Kei save comes out as well, as she reveals she’s alive and gives an instruction to push Nyarlathotep to a specific position where it turns out a massive Elder Sign has been prepared.
If you remember that Hunter Joe character who seemed like he was going to be important, his sole contribution is being silently credited with the legwork on the seal here, and then exposit after how he called a bunch of exorcists to somehow accomplish this. He was totally pointless, you could have had Kei do it herself, or use the friend she was rooming with if she needed the Great Old Ones to not detect her movement.
In any case, this gets the Crawling Chaos hit with the finishing move, there’s a lot of talk on his way out, Kanna vanishes into light for the time being, and the “fix it” clause of Miko’s win kicks in. Mayu wakes up from her coma (along with, supposedly, the others who were in her state), and it seems like the world has forgotten the whole horror show. Kanna is back to her episode 1 self where she wants revenge on Necronomico rather than the two of them being friends and she hasn’t faced her inner demons, the scummy occultist who was revealed to also have been a murderer before the show is doing great, the actress has at least a bit role. The manga artist gets a new series started, the teacher who turned out to be so crazy that he out-insaned the Great Old Ones is still harmlessly crazy.
Hunter Joe and Kei remember, and the former tries to recruit the latter. Eita remembers as well, and is not at all grateful for a second chance at life if his conversation with Miko is anything to go by. And with some hint that the echoes of the Old Ones may remain, the show stops.
Honestly, the last episode is extremely rushed and mostly steps down the quality of the actions and interactions. But that’s the end of Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show.
Oddly, Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show frequently recalls Kill la Kill of all shows. It’s a show about girls and women, in which male characters play minor (and in this case, antagonistic) roles. We’ve got a brash and not traditionally feminine girl who is angry all the time in the lead, paired with a softer compatriot. The energy is high and the sense is low.
But that comparison doesn’t reflect well on Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show. Miko is not on the same level as Ryuko Matoi. Miko basically never grows or changes, while Ryuko keeps her brash and angry core while learning and growing as a person. Miko’s static nature is brought up as a strength, in that her sanity doesn’t drop because of her monomaniacal focus on Mayu, but it makes her less compelling as a lead character. Not much else really holds up either; the gender issue(s) in this show feel more forced and artificial rather than organic as in Kill la Kill. The antagonists aren’t the biggest issue in the show, but they can’t really hold up to Satsuki or Ragyou in terms of viewer interest.
Then there are the issues that are all this show’s own, not in comparison to Kill la Kill.
The biggest one is Eita. Eita is narcissist extreme, a man drunk on his own ego to the point where he’d gleefully betray humanity as a whole just because the alternative would mean admitting and accepting that he had any kind of fault, convinced to the bitter end that he’s the smartest person in the room, uniquely positioned to always win in games and life alike. He is a hate-sink villain, and in that case the question becomes whether or not that makes him a bad character.
Hate sink villains are fine, in a sense. These are the baddies with no redeeming qualities (or very few that don’t really help), usually not even being particularly fun to watch or to follow. They exist for the audience to hate them, and to get more invested in the story through hating them. Especially in more morally gray works, an uncomplicated antagonist who you don’t need to think about or feel sorry for can be a relief for the audience, giving you something to cheer (or rather, to boo) without internal division.
Creating the hate-sink is decently done with Eita. He “kicks the dog” time and time again, and when his bad behavior starts with basically murdering someone who should have been a compatriot through abject treachery with reasoning so petty that it might as well be no reason at all? He wasn’t coming back from his first game bull, much less any of the stunts he continued to pull thereafter. He’s not funny or charming, he’s a complete piece of excrement so myopic that he is convinced everyone he meets is as awful as he is, and he infuriatingly thrives through his misdeeds.
However, when you deploy this kind of antagonist, their eventual comeuppance is essential. They have to get what’s coming to them. Now Eita does get slugged by Kanna, run over by Kanna, and has his eye removed by Tick Tock Man… but he does still basically get away with murder. I’ve compared him a great deal to Shinji Matou from Unlimited Blade Works, but Shinji had more nuance and granularity to his performance than Eita does after he reveals his true colors. And while Shinji is ultimately spared, at least in UBW, we do get to see him suffer humiliations and his salvation is all down to the ethos of the heroes rather than fate. Eita just sort of slips notice after Hastur’s game when he’s provided his last service to the Great Old Ones and is part of a package deal in the end.
Further, Shinji was a much smaller character in his story. He was reprehensible and you hated him for his scenes, but he didn’t get that many in the grand scheme of things. Because of that, the damage he’s done to the audience and the viewing experience is mild. Eita, by contrast spent the first half making the show harder and harder to watch because he was so awful, and because they kept the camera on him pretty constantly through his arc. With that, and never getting the full-force catharsis of watching karma bite him in the behind? It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
We needed to see Eita getting dragged off to jail for murder, kicking and screaming. Or, preferably, into the Shadow Realm with Hastur, again with his “always a winner” world view coming crashing down around his ears. I guess they didn’t reset his eye in the reset ending, but that comes off as small potatoes where he didn’t even learn his lesson about his behavior.
And, briefly, I want to counterpoint something I said in my review of Kissdum. There, they made the annoying brat the final boss, and I praised it. But that was entirely because there were no other enemies with personality. Here, the Great Old Ones are dripping with character and should have been the focus, and having a human jerk just distracted for as long as he was making a mess of things. When the Great Old Ones were as much characters as they were, the traitor player wasn’t needed. You have Nyarlathotep, for Haruhi’s sake!
But let’s move away from Eita for a moment and talk about the character who is the other biggest problem for this show, Kanna.
This is not because Kanna is a bad character. Far from it: Kanna is a dynamic character who shows rather than just telling the depths of what she’s been through, who we explore fully and who has a complicated relationship with the Mythos threat as this potential witch beloved by Azathoth; something she doesn’t want and never asked for but has to leverage all the same. As her sanity slips and she comes into line with the darkness, there’s a real power to her struggle to maintain her former persona, a joyful and kind high school girl totally at odds with the depths of Mythos insanity. Her final game against Ghatanothoa was particularly poignant, facing her with the sum of her life and forcing her to come to terms with both her own decisions and the tragedies that were foisted upon her.
In short, she is a dramatically better character than Miko and would have made a much better lead. Miko is, as I mentioned before, a pretty static character who we don’t do a lot of deep exploration of. Start to finish she’s driven by love for Mayu and doesn’t care about anything else. Miko’s claim to fame, other than the Necronomico streamer persona that fits in better with the Mythos theme, is that she has a personal rivalry with Cthulhu, the most famous and therefore plot-magnetic of the Great Old Ones. This hands her the final boss, and the main character slot to go with it.
And you might wonder if this is a problem. After all, Kanna being a good character means we get Kanna. Isn’t that better than the alternative, leaving Miko out of the equation?
The issue is that it generates some significant frustration when Kanna is sidelined in favor of said lesser headliner. Kanna gets the cool scenes. She’s the one who gives us the best we get for taking Eita down a peg, but there’s also a degree to which even those scenes have to end up framed around Miko because… hell, it’s her screen name in the title, she’s the main character. This isn’t an ensemble cast, it’s the Necronomico show and Kanna or anyone else has to play second fiddle.
I suppose the problem is arguably more on Miko because Kanna isn’t the only character better than she is – Kei would also be a superior protagonist despite her late entry into the games – but because Kanna gets a leg up as “Miko’s Frenemy” she’s closer to the spotlight and thus it’s most glaringly an issue that the spotlight ought to be on her instead.
Would it be better if Kanna wasn’t such a good character? Arguably, yes. Some of Kanna’s screen time could have been used to develop Necronomico a little more, and to look at our main character with some actual nuance, and you wouldn’t have the tension of a secondary character, in a death game where you have to believe they can die, distracting from a lead. Personally, I like having Kanna. I think she in isolation is the best takeaway from this show. Like team her up with Kan from last week’s review for your next Call of Cthulhu game, though she has more Player Character energy. But from a pure theoretical economy of writing standpoint, she probably shouldn’t have been this way in this show. One or the other needed to bend.
One thing I can’t fault Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show on is the style. Despite its modern-to-futuristic theme, it has a playfully retro aesthetic, drenched in neon-colored darkness and depicting a world of streamers and full-dive VR where floppy disks are the key and cassette tapes and analog TV test patterns are major design motifs. It’s appealing and deeply thematic.
You might wonder, at first, what that theme is doing connected to this property, as it seems like there are a lot of elements that are fighting each other. The streamer cast works with the VR death game, but the Great Old Ones? And then 80’s-90’s retro-tech and riotous colors? But then, the interface between the modern and the timeless is kind of a quiet theme in the show, with the Great Old Ones unable to adapt to a fully modern world, thus resulting in them sometimes being playthings of their stolen bodies. The retro stylings are both a delightful aesthetic on their own and to some degree an interface, being both modern in the grand scheme of things and incredibly dated.
Even if you’re not going to watch the show, look up the OP and ED. The bits, especially the OP, are good in their own right and dripping with theme, making for a very enjoyable viewing experience.
I also did ultimately like the Great Old Ones. Aside from Nyarlathotep as Tick-Tock Man, who is basically in his element, they are all extremely distant variants of their normal portrayal as entities, but they do mostly make themselves out to be these composites that are a mix of the incomprehensible otherworldly and the humans they inhabit, with the extra layer of Azathoth being bound into a game system regulating them all. And for the most part, they’re pretty fun antagonists.
But, as to the show as a whole, it’s a hard one to rate. On one hand, I was mostly entertained for the show’s running time. On the other hand, a number of the games were… kind of lame, even if there was some deliberate nature to that with the Old Ones imitating variety shows. The quiz was especially a misfire, since despite kind of promising notes on all our characters the only one that really landed was Kanna. We don’t even hear the answer to Miko’s old shame. Combined with the annoyance issues and structural problems, it makes the overall takeaway not a very good look.
Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show isn’t a great death game, but it is a passable one. It’s not a good representation of the Mythos, but there is some fun to the twist it brings to the theme. It’s style over substance, but there is some credit to the style. All over, there’s conflict on the final quality.
In the end, I am choosing to issue Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show a C-. It’s a watchable show, and there’s even at least one good reason to watch it in the form of Kanna. But I think whoever you are, whatever angle you come at it from, it’s going to annoy you somewhere along the line. I guess I am glad I watched it, but at the same time that’s a more personal note than something I think would hold true for others.
